Drawing on her experience as an HR and DE&I executive at Bank of America, Sandra Quince is now focused on making the workplace more equitable as the CEO of Paradigm for Parity, a nonprofit consortium funded by her former employer and other companies including AstraZeneca, Coca-Cola, CVS, Diageo, LinkedIn, Salesforce, and SAP.

Paradigm for Parity’s mission is to address “systemic gender and racial gaps in the corporate sector” by promoting “strategies that transform corporate leadership to assure that women of all races, cultures, and backgrounds have equal power and opportunity to advance.”

One of those strategies includes updating performance reviews, an oft-maligned and dreaded corporate process that can feel like it serves little value to either side of the interaction: the manager or the direct report.

“What’s most important is that managers are connecting more frequently, regardless of whether or not [it’s by] doing performance reviews,” Quince told HR Brew. “When you’re doing performance reviews, it is all subjective. We’re human and we all have biases. So, one of the challenges that you find is that we bring our bias into this process.”

HR leaders should consider reevaluating their promotion and performance review data to check for bias, Quince said, and managers should be making an intentional effort to know and understand their reports’ unique goals and needs.

“Do I know what drives them? Am I having the right conversations, so that I can advocate for them, and be their voice at the table, and potentially be their sponsors? As well as, am [I] providing information to my peers around what my team is doing and how they’re performing?”

Keep reading.—AK

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It’s always a ruff day at the office for Scott Sterling, VP of people operations at BarkBox. The subscription dog toy and treat company’s offices in Columbus, Ohio, and NYC feature bring-your-dog-to-work days every day, and when Sterling logs on remotely, he’s got four pooches making cameos on Zoom. His furry friends don’t stop Sterling and his “scrappy” team from bringing “some structure and a little bit of discipline” to the startup’s HR paw-licies and procedures.

Sterling worked in HR for companies like Rubbermaid, Abercrombie & Fitch, and Best Buy before transitioning to HR consulting and executive coaching in Ohio. That’s when he got acquainted with the team at BarkBox as clients. Sterling moved into a role with the company in June 2020 to help take the HR department “to the next level,” and he’s been at it ever since.

What’s the best change you’ve made at a place you’ve worked?

Rolling out a structured promotion process to recognize and retain great talent. We’ve established a quarterly process and…part of that is formal recognition for people, so that they have a career path. Part of it also is from a DE&I standpoint to say, “There is discipline to this…It’s not just a popularity contest for who gets promoted.” We have definite criteria…We’re promoting the people that have shown that they’re doing what they need to do to get to the next level, and we go through a submission process that’s reviewed by the whole leadership team…That was done to promote fairness in the process.

Keep reading.—AD

Just as remote work has become more popular over the past three years, so has the four-day workweek.

Earlier this year, results from the world’s largest trial of the four-day workweek—conducted in the UK between June 2022 and December 2022—revealed that workers are by and large ready to leave the five-day, 40-hour workweek in the past. The study’s authors called the experiment, which included 61 companies and more than 2,000 workers, a “resounding success.”

Given that marketing and advertising was the most-represented industry in the trial, we spoke with three participating agency executives about their experiences, including Claire Daniels, CEO of digital marketing agency Trio Media.

Getting involved. Daniels told us that she became interested in the trial both from an employee happiness and productivity standpoint: “Obviously, the underlying element as a business owner is around profitability, cost savings, and increasing revenue, because it’s about getting more without increasing our costs.”

As with Amplitude and Literal Humans, Daniels said she was concerned about people being stressed or working longer hours to be able to take an additional day off. In the end, she said she was “very much proven wrong.”

Keep reading on Marketing Brew.—KH

You landed the best candidate for the job. But how do you keep them happy? (Hint: It’s in the data.)

Join us TOMORROW for a virtual event on making data work for HR. Led by Christine Maginnis, Hilton’s SVP of HR Strategy and Talent, we’ll discuss how to identify, organize, and leverage employee data for improved organizational outcomes.

Register today.

Today’s top HR reads.

Stat: Low-wage workers in the US earned 9% more in 2022 than they did in 2019, faster wage growth than “any other period of economic shock” since 1979. (Economic Policy Institute)

Quote: “If your workforce strategy and your workforce culture is determined by the economy, then you’re doing something wrong.”—Tsedal Neeley, professor at Harvard Business School, on why employers shouldn’t change how they treat employees based on how the economy is performing (Vox)

Read: People who moved to small or remote towns at the height of remote work are faced with uncertain futures after layoffs. (Bloomberg)

Let’s talk about health equity: Here’s what people really think about the state of healthcare today. Download the report from LetsGetChecked to learn more about satisfaction trends, challenges, and unmet needs of the US healthcare system.*

^{*This is sponsored advertising content.}